🇳🇱 Politics and Elections in the Netherlands: General Election (Nov 22)

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Wow; it didn't seem like he was particularly doomed or anything. The smart money at least seemed to be that the van der Plas/Omtzigt challenge had lots of problems and Rutte was likely to get another term; I guess he ran out of drive, or something. End of an era.

How does VVD fare in the absence of Rutte as a leader?

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Tried Checkjestem as well.

BVNL 73
VVD 62
SGP 62
Forum for Democracy 58
JA21 50
New Social Contract 50
BBB 46
CDA 46
PVV 42
CU 38
D66 35
Volt 35
DENK 31
GroenLinks-PvdA 27
SP 27
PvdD 19
BIJ1 19

Vaguely feeling like a VVD/PVV swing voter in this election. In the last few elections I "supported" smaller parties -- the Pirates in 2017 and JA21 in 2021 -- but none of the ones this time around really catch my fancy. I think VVD is closer to my beliefs but if I were Dutch, and had been paying attention to politics since 2006-2010, most likely I would consider PVV a "natural home" of sorts. (I watched the clip of Wilders owning Baudet in the Tweede Kamer and it absolutely reminded me of all the reasons I like him). VVD have also been in government for far too long, although PVV is probably a bit of a wasted vote. Not sure which direction I'd end up going in.

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Apparently closest to VVD, but there's no one in my general vicinity.

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Are you also PVV then presumably, David?

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The party that I have actually supported on Election Day during my time following Dutch politics -- the high number of parties makes this a strange exercise, since it tracks not just my political evolution, or the evolution of Dutch politics, but the evolution of my willingness or lack thereof to support very small parties:
2010: PVV
2012: VVD
2017: Pirates
2021: JA21
2023: PVV

A weird "full circle"; I am not that enamored by the PVV necessarily (my full expectation is that they will make government formation impossible and in the next election my hypothetical-vote will be for VVD, or for a minor-right party which isn't quite so large), but they simply have the correct enemies at the current moment, including on the far-right itself.

More so than the huge numbers of parties and the low threshold, the thing that strikes me as making Dutch politics very weird is the existence of, and demand for, a huge "go along to get along" party. CDA is dying but it on some level remains the natural largest party and center of government, and the NSC leading the polls in this campaign shows that there is some demand among under-70 voters for a party with CDA's niche. Even if Omtzigt collapsed at the end, it seems to have been more because of his own weird inconsistencies rather than because of problems with the NSC as a concept.

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Exit Poll from Nos/IPSOS:



Big lead by PVV

...

...

How realistic is not having Prime Minister Wilders at those numbers?

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Didn't Omtzigt refuse to rule out working with Wilders? PVV/VVD/NSC seems like the fairly obvious call on these numbers, even if that might make working with the Senate difficult and even if the deal those three outfits might reach is not obvious.

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How much of an option is GL/PvdA/VVD/NSC/D66? It is mathematically a majority but it feels difficult to imagine VVD joining a 5-party coalition where they would be the furthest-right party.

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Am I right in thinking that if GL and PvdA had run separately that they would've combined for significantly more than the GL/PvdA coalition? It seems like there are large numbers of people who might've have voted GL, but never PvdA, and who might've voted PvdA, but never GL. The point of combining was to try to advance Timmermans for PM, and maybe that was a reasonable goal after the 2019 Euro elections (...although in that case they should've tried it in 2021), but it doesn't seem like they actually came anywhere close, and being concerned with maintaining seat count was more reasonable.

Are GL/PvdA likely to run together at the next election? (And I realize there might be separate answers depending on whether the next election is in 1 year or 5).

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What is the difference between PVV and FvD? I'm not seeing much reason for them to be different parties u less it's just a personalist thing.

FvD was much more focused on conspiracy theories and anti-Atlanticism while PVV was more 'normal' in that regard. FvD had a brief bubble a few years ago because they were the most prominent, loudest anti-lockdown voices, but since then they've fallen apart, with there being a viral moment (in Dutch unfortunately) where their leader, Baudet, speculates in Parliament that the moon landing may not have happened, and then Wilders mocks him by saying "this man is halfway to the moon already".

The divide between very-culturally-right-and-open-to-conspiracy-theories (Baudet) against very-culturally-right-but-living-in-the-real-world (Wilders) might be more visible to someone actually on the right (especially if you interpret skepticism about climate change, which I think they've both voiced, as "conspiracy theory"), but from my perspective they're really quite different. (A big tell here is that Wilders is very Zionist -- he literally lived in a West Bank settlement for some time in the 1980s -- and Baudet is more along the lines of being afraid of ZOG). Reaching for American equivalents is very hard, but if I had to compare to someone Baudet would be along the lines of a Charlie Kirk (a widely-mocked media figure), while Wilders is...uh...maybe Giuliani (guy who is moderate economically and even socially but very very very extreme culturally, and has also been around as a significant political figure basically forever), or given the weird ties to foreign movements perhaps Ron Paul (though Wilders is quite moderate economically but, again, very very very extreme culturally -- his most signature proposal is banning the Quran).

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If it can't be Wilders, and if Yesilgöz doesn't want to be PM of a PVV-VVD-NSC-BBB government, and Omtzigt was never running for PM, and it's unclear whether Mona Keijzer was even the BBB candidate...then who ends up being the Prime Minister?

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I know I'm a dumb American, but don't big-tent anti- (insert party here) coalitions generally seem to result in said party gaining ground? Like I know part of the reason FdI surged so much between 2018 and 2022 was because they were the only party always in the opposition.

I could easily see an anti-PVV coalition collapsing and Wilders getting 50 seats in the next election.

Wait, are you not Norwegian?

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My suspicion in Germany is that Die Linke is going to get sane-washed before AfD does; if it really is replaced by a wholly new Wagenknecht-led party which the SPD and Greens are broadly willing to form a coalition with, then an actually left-wing coalition becomes an option again, and the "negative majority" scenario of AfD and Linke is placed much further away.

I agree that there's obviously room for a party between where the current CDU is and where the current AfD is (and the polls showing the CSU going national would do well demonstrate this), but I don't think such a party is all that close to actually forming while the CDU is polling so well for the next election, and I think when it does form it would be likelier to do well if it were a further-right breakoff from the CDU/CSU rather than if it were the AfD splitting in half. It's kind of forgotten now outside the Netherlands, but PVV was originally a split-off from the VVD (and it also benefited from the general legacy of Pim Fortuyn making the cordon sanitaire against the far-right much less of a thing than it was in most places), and I think this made them more credible to certain voters.

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Calvinist hellhole (Urk)
SGP 48.3% (-6.2)
PVV 25.8% (+12)
NSC 6.0% (new)
BBB 5.0% (+4.9)
CU 4.1% (-4)
CDA 3.7% (-4.1)
FvD 3.7% (-5.9)
VVD 0.9% (-0.8 )
GL-PvdA 0.7% (+0.2)

First time SGP under 50% here?

slow die-off of people, SGP are mostly people who vote for that their entire life.

I'm not sure whether the fun fact that the SGP is the party with the largest youth wing is still true (I distinctly recall that it was at the time of the 2012 election), but in general in the First World, in countries which have these hyper-Protestant subcultures, they're virtually always growing through differential fertility rates. SGP had an extra seat among the 18-35 demographic, in spite of obviously losing a substantial fraction of their normal base to the PVV surge.

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How much power does the Senate have? Is it just a chamber of review, like the British House of Lords or Spanish Senate, or does it have the power to actually block legislation?

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Does Maurice de Hon also have numbers for some of the smaller parties? I'd love to see a link to the data (even if it's in Dutch, I'll figure it out; even if it's behind a paywall I can break through it).

The thing that jumps out at me is that of the parties large enough to be included in your tables, three have their greatest support among older voters and decline the younger their electorate gets (VVD, NSC, and SP); if NSC is mostly poaching CDA genepool voters, well, the CDA genepool remains quite old. VVD and NSC are going to be fine -- they still have support among the youngest voters, even if there is less -- but SP declines to literally 0%.

Only one party actually has the reverse pattern of greatest strength among younger voters: CU. Another sign, like with the SGP, that younger voters are surprisingly religious? Denk is not included in your numbers but it's fairly obvious this would also apply to them, and I'm curious regarding FvD (and for that matter SGP itself).

Women preferring BBB pretty strongly makes some sense to me (now that I think about it, it feels perfectly attuned to be a far-right party with appeal mostly to women), but I'm surprised that'd be true for PVV. Similarly, mostly men voting D66 doesn't surprise me (there is some part of me that wants to vote for the party most opposed to fighting the drug war and I suspect if I lived in the Netherlands it would be stronger -- and I probably would be a local-level D66 voter -- but it makes sense to me that this is a masculine feeling), but I'm surprised more men than women vote GL/PvdA. Environmental politics in general strikes me as skewing female -- why is their electorate so masculine? (Has the Netherlands avoided the general global trend where over time women have become more educated than men?)

With education by far the clearest trends are that a more educated voter is likelier to support VVD and a less educated voter is likelier to support SP; everything else is more qualified. It makes sense to me, honestly, that D66 follows mostly the VVD pattern but sees a small boost with the least educated voters; I feel like I can imagine who those people are.

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Women preferring BBB pretty strongly makes some sense to me (now that I think about it, it feels perfectly attuned to be a far-right party with appeal mostly to women), but I'm surprised that'd be true for PVV. Similarly, mostly men voting D66 doesn't surprise me (there is some part of me that wants to vote for the party most opposed to fighting the drug war and I suspect if I lived in the Netherlands it would be stronger -- and I probably would be a local-level D66 voter -- but it makes sense to me that this is a masculine feeling), but I'm surprised more men than women vote GL/PvdA. Environmental politics in general strikes me as skewing female -- why is their electorate so masculine? (Has the Netherlands avoided the general global trend where over time women have become more educated than men?)

GL has always had a more female base and the PvdA a slightly more male one or a balanced one, so I guess we'll have to wait for further studies to prove whether De Hond's statistics are true in the first place, and if so, what could be behind it. First, I suspected it could be the case that similar female voters would go PvdD leaving the GL-PvdA electorate more male, but De Hond's own statistics don't show such an effect for the PvdD. The same goes for the surprising overperformance of the PVV among women. The Netherlands follows the international trend of women being more highly educated so that cannot be the reason.

I would dispute your classification of BBB as a far-right party. Even the "the PopuList" classifies it as a borderline case.

Gotcha, fascinating stuff. What I was trying to say about BBB was not calling it out so much as just noticing that it is a new right-wing party with a base among people from the periphery, not that I was saying that its ideas were unacceptably far-right or anything, and that for such a party it seems very female in presentation: the only two BBB figures I can name, van der Plas and Keijzer, are both women, and this is unusual for a new right-wing party. It feels like it makes sense that it has a majority-female electorate, and I wonder how much sense a party with a presentation like BBB's might make in other European party systems.

(there is some part of me that wants to vote for the party most opposed to fighting the drug war and I suspect if I lived in the Netherlands it would be stronger

What drug war? Except for maybe Portugal (but I don't know much about it...) I don't think there is any country in Europe as lenient to drug users as the Netherlands. The police doesn't go after them at all. The only 'war' is against the types of crime that completely overwhelm entire communities, the type of crime that causes politicians and lawyers and crime reporters to require permanent security - and the police are losing it. There is no quick fix for that.

In any case, this is national policy so local D66 branches can't do anything about it. The only thing they can do is support local 'coffee shops'.

Well, yeah; in the US the Netherlands is seen as a legendarily drug-friendly country, and when I was in college it was uniformly the case (although my understanding is that a Biden-era crackdown has changed this) that online orders of particular drugs (especially "research chemicals") would invariably arrive from the Netherlands. I can imagine a voter with little education who would see preserving this state of affairs as their main issue, and I feel like this voter would be likeliest to vote D66 (?), as the most social liberal party, or maybe PvdD. They would also be much likelier to be a man than a woman.

I tend to be very favorable towards drug legalization and my sympathy for D66 comes mostly from this issue, even if they seem terrible on foreign affairs (and free speech, at least according to Wilders?). A large part of my Hollandophilia comes from noticing that it's a country where parties on different extremes, like D66 and PVV, seem unusually good on specific issues and to have virtues I'd like to see imported to my country.